 Good afternoon everybody, good afternoon. It's now just about eight bells I guess. For those of you who don't know me, I'm John Pintangelo, the managing director here at the museum. John Kennedy sends his regrets. He is probably, he's making his way towards the Inca ruins in Chile right now. He'll be back in a couple of weeks. Welcome to today's eight bells lecture. To check up on upcoming lectures, you know you can check our Facebook page at www.facebook.com slash naval war college museum. Or just give Kelly your email and you can receive regular emails on upcoming lectures. Up next on September 26th, we will have Oliver Hazard Perry in the Temple of Fame by Stephanie Aco. And then on the 3rd of October, we will have Congo, the miserable expeditions and dreadful death of Lieutenant Emery Taunt USN. And that book is about a young naval officer who's given the mission to explore the Congo River in May 1885. And he's tasked with reporting on opportunities for American business interests. The trip which had started out with such great promise and hope for wealth ended with bankruptcy, disgrace, and ultimately death. So promises to be two exciting lectures coming up. As a reminder, the format of the eight bells lecture has the author speaking for about 40 to 45 minutes. The last 15 to 20 minutes are given over for questions. And books from today's lecture are on sale in the foundation gift shop on the first floor and there will be opportunities to have those signed at the end of the lecture. Today's presentation is on the book Athenia Torpedoed by Dr. Francis Carroll. The British ocean liner Athenia was torpedoed within eight and a half hours of a British declaration of war on 3rd September 1939. This book discusses not only the dramatic rescue of 1300 passengers, it also discusses how this event shaped policy for Britain, Canada, and the United States. The author, Dr. Francis Carroll is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He has published 10 books and is the winner of the J.W. Defoe Prize and the Albert B. Corey Prize for his work. A good and wise measure the search for Canadian American boundary 1783 to 1842. To tell you more about the book, Athenia Torpedoed and his research, I give you Dr. Francis Carroll. Well thank you very much and thank you very much for having me here. I'm delighted to get to the Naval War College Museum, which I wanted to see for years, and for one reason or another not been able to make it. So here I am and I'm delighted to have an opportunity to talk with you about the Athenia and its misadventures. When I do speak about the Athenia, I generally ask if anybody in the audience has ever heard of it. Now this is an unusual audience. So I don't think I would get the typical response that never heard of the thinking of this ship or any of its stories. But I see several of you have copies of the book, so this will not be a fair question. My interest, and John Kennedy suggested that I talk about how I came to write the book for a bit. And so I want to do that. And my interest arose out of curiosity in all of the sort of standard works of either the naval history of the war or just the outbreak of the war. That kind of litany of events are discussed. The ultimatum, of course Poland was invaded on the 1st of September 1939. The British government and the French government tried to work out how to respond to that. And an ultimatum was sent to the Germans on Saturday to expire at 11 o'clock on Sunday the 3rd of September. And the Germans did not respond to the ultimatum to withdraw their troops from Poland, so war broke out. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain goes on the national radio to announce that a state of war exists. Parliament met later in the afternoon and Winston Churchill is brought into the cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. And the Athenian was sunk. This is one or two lines in the first page of the discussion of the beginning of the war. Samuel Elliott Morrison's famous book, for example, has a couple of lines. Captain Stephen Roskill's book of the Royal Navy in the war similarly has a couple of lines in the book. But no real discussion. I began to get curious, what was this ship, the Athenia, and where was it going and who was involved. So I did a Google search and I found that there was one book on the Athenia written in 1958 and 59 by an Irish journalist, a Northern Irish journalist, Max Caulfeld. I had read some of his work. He's also written some history of Ireland. So I recognized the name right away and managed to get a copy of the book, which is very good. It's a very interesting and well thought out book, but it's written before all of the documents were available. And it's written largely from a UK point of view, a British point of view. And I thought there must be more there. There must be another story. The ship was sailing from Glasgow, Belfast, and Liverpool to Quebec City and Montreal. And of course it was loaded with Americans and Canadians. So there must be an American dimension to this story as well. So fate would have it. I was in Europe, I was giving a lecture in Germany and I stopped in London on the way home and spent about a week at what we, old historians like to call the PRO, but now the National Archives of Britain. And I found quite an enormous amount of stuff in the admiralty papers, the ministry of transport papers, the cabinet papers, the foreign office papers, really a wealth of very informative material. I got back to Winnipeg. I went on my catalogue of State Department material and I found the State Department had five microfilm reels on the Athenian. So I ordered those by the interlibrary loan and got right to work on the State Department stuff and there was a terrific amount. The State Department interviewed every American citizen that survived the sinking of the ship with the view in mind that the Athenian might become the Lusitania of the Second World War. They wanted to find out how was the ship sunk, who was involved, could the destruction be explained in legal terms? They were never really able to arrive at a legal definition of who sunk the ship. Germans denied responsibility and accused the British of sinking the ship themselves. The British threw up their hands and said, well, that was completely preposterous, of course. It was clear that a submarine had sunk the ship but who's submarine? So it never became the Lusitania issue in World War II but it did provide all of these wonderful records anywhere from a paragraph to five pages of witness statements. Hundreds of them in these State Department records. So at that point I realized I had the substance of quite a good story here. The Canadian government provided me with a lot of documents. The Irish government provided some documents and I really began to put together a lot of material to explain what had happened and how this crisis had developed. I also went on Google and of course Google has really become a wonderful search engine and I turned up not so much government records, of course, but personal statements, survivor accounts. Google led me to any number of libraries and I was able to obtain documents from these libraries and began to build up a really diverse and interesting series of profiles of survivors. So I really had what amounts to material going in two directions. The policy issues and the international law issues concerning the use of submarines and the sinking of civilianships and all of the policy implications to flow from that together with all of these survivor accounts. 112 people were killed but an enormous number were saved and so there were a lot of harrowing experiences but a lot of survivor accounts as well. So I then really felt I had the substance for a book. I wrote a couple of articles but the book was the major effort. But anyway I want to show you some pictures. Nobody's ever seen the Athenian so I want to show you some pictures of the Athenian. This is a postcard and if you remember all these steamships had their postcards and stationaries and this is a pre-war postcard of the Athenian as projected by the steamship company. The Athenian was a small kind of niche market passenger ship run by the Donaldson line out of Glasgow. Donaldson line goes back to the 1850s dealing with both freight and passenger but by the 1920s and 30s it really serviced the market from Scotland and Northern England to Canada. It competed with the Canadian Pacific steamship lines operating out of Southern England but this was a major link between Canada and the UK. They had two passenger ships, the Athenia here and its sister ship the Leticia. They were both built in 1923. We're capable of carrying about 1400 passengers. Never carried that many as far as I can make out. This is the Athenia on the Clyde and Glasgow was its home port. I think that the two ships in the background are the Cameroonia and the Transylvania but I could be wrong about that. This is actually a still from a motion picture and the information associated with it's a little vague. It picked up passengers in Glasgow on the 1st of September and sailed at about noon and went down the Clyde and out across the Irish Sea to Belfast and in Belfast lock picked up more passengers later in the evening and then overnight sailed to Liverpool and began taking on passengers at about noon in Liverpool and sailed at about 4.30 in the afternoon. Went out around the Isle of Man and up through the Irish Sea in the North Channel and was just southwest of Rockhall Bank on the early evening late afternoon of Sunday September 3. Where it encountered the German submarine the U-30 and this was the kind of workhorse submarine type 7 submarine that had sailed from Wilhelmshaven on about the 19th of August. A number of submarines sortied within days of each other to get on station around the British Isles and Northern France in the event that war broke out and as it did on Sunday the 3rd and by the mid-afternoon all these submarines received radio messages to engage the enemy. The skipper of the submarine was Fritz Julius Lemp who was seen here with Admiral Donuts. I think this photograph is August of 1940 when Lemp was given the Knight's Cross. He was given an Iron Cross in October of 1939 and the next rank in January of 1940 and by the summer of 1940 was given the Knight's Cross. So he was one of the really outstanding submarine commanders. He sunk at least 17 or 19 ships so he had a very strong record. But in addition to creating problems with the sinking of the Athenian he was also commander of the U-110. Does that...anybody recognize the U-110? The U-110 was the submarine that was forced to the surface and he ordered the crew to abandon ship and a party from HMS went on board and got the code books which was of course an enormous breakthrough for reading the German naval code, the Enigma naval code. So Lemp was a mixed blessing for the Germans in several respects. Here's the ship just before it went under photograph taken on Monday morning the fourth of September. The ship sank at about 11 o'clock sometime between 10 and 11 but there are a couple of photographs this is the best one of it that I have found. But everybody got off everybody who was alive got off the ship and you can see the lines from the davits along the side of the ship. So by this time the lifeboats had got away and most of the survivors had been picked up by various relief ships that were able to get over to it. But the news of the sinking of the ship spread around certainly the English speaking world. Immediately the New York Times had very large headlines but all the other newspapers in Great Britain and Canada and the United States Poland was a long way away but North Atlantic travel affected everyone certainly in the coastal areas. So the newspapers all covered the sinking of the ship. The weeklies like Life Magazine had special articles about it as well. I was amazed to find that Life Magazine the leading photo magazine didn't have any pictures of the ship but they commissioned somebody to do this elaborate drawing of the sinking of the Athenian. I suspect the royalty fees were too high for the photographs or something. This turns up in the September 13 I think issue of Life Magazine. But one of the real stories here is the relief effort and several ships were involved in that. This is a picture of the Knut Nelson owned by the Norwegian shipping firm Fred Olsen and Company and it had seen the U-boat running on the surface earlier on Sunday morning before a war broke out. So it was really only about 6-7 hours steaming distance from the Athenian. It arrived at the scene just a little after midnight and began taking on passengers and in fact picked up some 430 survivors. The second vessel was the Stemiot Southern Cross which as fate would have it was the largest private Stemiot in the world at the time. It was owned by a man by the name of Axel Wiener-Gren who was the head of the Electrolux Company and who also had interests in Saab and Bofors. Here was this wealthy Swedish multi-millionaire with his American wife who also got to the scene of the Athenian shortly after midnight and began taking on survivors as well. Some 176 were picked up by the Southern Cross and three Royal Navy destroyers were detached from escort duty and sent from the Scottish coast and they arrived early in the morning just about first light. This is HMS Electra but both HMS Escort and HMS were named also assisted. The Electra was an E-class destroyer built in 1934 and had a really interesting and distinguished history. Later Electra was one of the escorts for HMS Hood in that disaster and it was Electra that picked up the three survivors of the sinking HMS Hood in May of 1941. It was then sent out later as escorting HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse and picked up survivors when those two ships were sunk in the South China Sea. But it was later lost in the Battle of the Java Sea in February of 1942. The Electra picked up 238 people and the Escort 403 and they brought their survivors into Glasgow. So the survivors began coming into a variety of ports. The Norwegian ship, Norway had declared its neutrality and they wanted to send their ship into a neutral port so they went into Galway. Here you see the tender that picked people up from the Knut Nelsen and brought them into Galway. Galway provided absolutely wonderful hospitality for the survivors there who were in an absolutely disparate stage. Many of the people were in bed because they were seasick. Others were at dinner. There were lots of children on board the ship. So the pictures of the survivors in distress coming into Galway are really something. The destroyers brought their survivors into Glasgow and Glasgow also provided wonderful hospitality. But the ambassador to Great Britain of course in 1939 was Joseph P. Kennedy and Kennedy was bombarded with Americans trying to get back to the United States and so he was completely preoccupied with that problem. So he sent his 22 year old son John F. Kennedy up to Glasgow to look after the American survivors there. Here you see him with the mayor of Glasgow, the Lord Provost, John Dolan and several of the survivors. Here he is with the U.S. Council General Leslie Davis. He was a great success. There's a whole lot of mythology that surrounds John F. Kennedy which we historians sometimes raise a cynical eye about but in fact he was terrific in easing people's minds and reassuring them that they were going to be looked after and thanking the Glasgow authorities that he charmed everyone which is really a delightful story. Now another vessel that was involved in all of this was the American freighter the City of Flint, a U.S. Maritime Commission vessel the City of Flint and it has a tangled history in all of this in that it was under some pressure from Ambassador Kennedy it was already taking some 29 civilians was not fitted for passengers and so they had to build bunks in the shelter deck out of lumber in the ship's stores and they got some extra supplies to deal with these passengers and they put to sea but they picked up the distress signal of the Athenian and went back and they took the passengers from the Southern Cross. They took all of the survivors who wanted to go on to North America and so they picked up all together 236 survivors so they had to make a whole lot more bunks out of timber in the shelter deck and they got more food from several other vessels that they met on the way but it's a marvelous story. The captain of the City of Flint was Joseph Gaynard who wrote a wonderful memoir called the Yankee Skipper and the City of Flint had several adventures after got back to the United States and discharged its cargo and picked up a new cargo and headed off into the North Atlantic once again for the UK and stopped and boarded by a prize crew from the German pocket battleship Deutschland and they sailed the City of Flint toward Germany but they put into Norway and then put into Mermansk and not until they were coming back down along the Norwegian coast did the Norwegian authorities intervene and turn this ship back over to Gaynard who could then bring it back to the United States. So this was a ship which had a lot of adventures. The US government in response to all of this sent out to Coast Guard Cutters the bib and the Campbell, the George M. Bib and the George W. Campbell to escort the City of Flint into Halifax and here is a picture at the dock in Halifax. In the book I have a picture of a mounted policeman escorting someone down the gangplank but this was a major event. On the 13th of September the City of Flint brought the first Athenian survivors back to North America. Now the city of Flint, pardon me, the Athenian was not one of the glamour vessels so it did not have all kinds of movie stars and politicians and the sort of glamourous people that might be expected in a transatlantic voyage but I've got a couple of people I want to point out to you. This is Judith Evelyn an aspiring actress and you might remember her as Miss Lonely Hearts in Rear Window. By that time she was a little past it and was getting a bit parts but she had quite a successful career and in 1941 won the Drama League Award in New York playing opposite Price in Angel Street which was later made into a movie called Gaslight and Ingrid Bergman played the part in the movie. But Judith Evelyn was the star in the Broadway production. If you're World War II buffs and are keen on the air war you might recognize this figure James A. Goodson or Goody Goodson, is that name ring a bell? Goody Goodson destroyed about 30 German planes before he was shot down himself but he was a young man on the Athenian and very heroically helped rescue people in the damaged parts of the ship, got back to the United States and Canada and went up to the University of Toronto and had a year at the University of Toronto but got into the Officer-Candidate school attached to the University of Toronto and got his pilot's wings in the Canadian Air Force and then flew with the Eagle Squadron in England and after the United States came into the war he transferred to the Air Force so he had quite an interesting record, came out of the war a Lieutenant Colonel and here you see him in the cockpit of one of his planes. This is a group of four, pardon me, three of 18 college girls from the University of Texas. Just as today a lot of college students went to Europe for the summer and this was a kind of package tour. All these girls were schoolmates from a school in Texas as well as classmates at the University of Texas and they were split up between those sailing on the Athenian and those sailing on the city of Flint so it was a tremendous reunion when the survivors of the Athenian were taken on board the city of Flint. The girl on the left is Rowena Simpson whose family papers were deposited at the public library in Houston in the Texas collection in Houston so I was able to get into her papers which gave me an insight into all of these girls and the experiences they had which was great fun for me. This is another Hollywood figure. The man on the left is Ernst Lubisch, the film director. In my estimation his most famous film would be No Natchka which you can see on Turner Classic movies from time to time but he did a lot of things. He had a long history of film directing in Germany and one of his famous films was the early version of the Mary Widow. He's holding there his infant daughter Nicola. Nicola and her nurse Carlina Strowmare were on the Athenia and Carlina Strowmare got great credit for looking after the infant girl and protecting her and getting her into the lifeboat and bringing her back safe and sound. These are some of the images that give you some picture of the story of the ship but they don't deal with the question that I always kind of by implication in my opening remarks as to why nobody has ever heard of the Athenia and its sinking. Is it just a footnote to history or is there some importance to the sinking of the Athenia quite apart from the survivor stories and all these interesting incidents. So what I'd like to also do this morning is give you just a couple of statements about what seemed to me to be the importance of the sinking of the Athenia. For one thing in the U.S. it rallied opinion about the threat of war. President Roosevelt had tried to get the neutrality legislation amended in the summer of 1939 and couldn't get the votes to do it. So he reconvened Congress in late September and by November was able to have the neutrality legislation amended to allow for the cash and carry of munitions. Previous legislation had put an arms embargo on belligerents and in the amended legislation it was possible for the United States to sell munitions to the British and French. In the crisis also he opened his correspondence with Churchill. He telephoned Winston Churchill and so the beginning of that unique relationship between FDR and Winston Churchill really gets started in the aftermath of the Athenia and the Iroquois incident. So I think in a very real way this is the first step to making the United States the arsenal of democracy to use Roosevelt's phrase about a year later. In Canada it had a powerful public opinion effect as well in pushing a reluctant population to support the war. It brought the war home. All the Canadians involved in the sinking of the ship suggested that this was not just another European war, another British war and so in the war declaration debate and the debate over the measure to go to war the issue of the Athenia was raised. The Prime Minister's Quebec Lieutenant Ernst Le Point speaking to Parliament with the reluctant French population in mind said specifically some say we are not interested. People were saying that last Sunday at the very moment an enemy submarine was torpedoing the liner Athenia which was carrying over 500 Canadian passengers who might have lost their lives and one of the opposition figures in the debate said also I say we owe a duty to those passengers tonight and so on the 8th of September on Saturday the 8th the war measure was passed and on Sunday the 9th of September Canada went to war. Now in Britain I think it's fair to say the impact was the greatest Churchill as you remember had come in as First Lord of the Admiralty on Sunday itself. He informed the cabinet the following morning and the House of Commons later in the afternoon but working with his staff at the Admiralty office he began putting together what would be the convoy program for the war. Several other ships were sunk in close succession. The freighters Blaerlogy, Bosnia, Royal Scepter and Rio Clara and it seemed to Churchill and several other people that the Germans had reverted to unrestricted submarine warfare on the first day of the war. That was not actually the case but the fact that all of these submarines were off the coast and actually sinking ships against many people that the 1918 situation had come back. And so by Wednesday evening that first week of the war the decision was made at the Admiralty office to go to convoys the following day on the 7th of September all merchant ships leaving the Thames or the Mersey on the 4th and all ships sailing along the east coast of Britain would sail in convoys. Exceptions were made for vessels who could steam in excess of 50 knots or who sailed under 9 knots but this was really the beginning of the convoy policy. Churchill in his memoirs writes that this talking about the earlier plans to phase in convoys really in the English Channel in the North Sea he writes in his memoirs the sinking of the Athenia upset those plans and we adopted the convoy in the North Atlantic forthwith. Other implications were also that it pushed Churchill and the Admiralty to begin to build escort vessels as fast as they could. Churchill accelerated the construction of destroyers, pushed the hunt class destroyers into rapid construction and pushed the development of a vessel based on a Norwegian whaler which became the flower class corvette because they could be built in small shipyards and in 1940 and 41 over 100 flower class corvettes were built in the UK and Canada and they were equipped as I'm sure you know with either three or four inch guns with depth charges with sonar and later with radar and by 1943 it would be a larger castle class corvette was put forward as well and I think it's not too much of a stretch to say that the building of destroyer escorts in the United States was a direct follow up from the need to have a lot of escort vessels and so US construction of destroyer escorts brought vessels into commission by late 1942 and they were built right up until the end of the war. So I think in a fascinating way the sinking of the Athenian had profound effects. It was not just a footnote to the history of the war, not just a series of interesting survivor accounts in terms of cementing the link between Roosevelt and Churchill in terms of shifting the arms embargo to a cash and carry policy in the US and in Canada helping to build unity to achieve a heavily supported declaration of war in the UK moving immediately to convoys. Remember in the first world war convoys weren't implemented until June of 1917 so to go immediately to convoys was a major step and the building of escort vessels to service the convoys. Give the Athenian I think a prominent place in my judgment in any case. Well anyway that's my story of the Athenian. I hope you've found it interesting and useful. Yes I understand questions are available. I'm delighted to answer any. There's no really good explanation but it's probably fair to say that Fritz Julius Lemp gets the instructions to commence hostilities and he's aware of the international law, the submarine protocol of the London naval tree, but all of these skippers had been warned by donuts before they sailed to beware of armed merchant cruisers and what he saw coming across the water south of Rockall Bank was this fast moving 16 knots passenger ship all blacked out and zigzagging in anti-submarine formation and he suspected this was an armed merchant cruiser and only after he began to see hundreds of people streaming off the side of the ship did he go down to the radio room and check Lloyd's registry of ships whereas radio operator told him also that distress signals were being sent in the clear by the Athenian only at that point did he realize that he'd sunk a passenger ship. But he also fired four torpedoes so he was certainly going to make sure that he sunk the vessel and the passengers although the German records don't reveal this, the passengers all claim that that gun was fired at least once, perhaps twice. So it's difficult to know quite what happened he was mildly reprimanded when he got back to Germany but by that time he'd sunk four ships he rescued two British pilots and he landed the two British pilots and an injured crew member in Iceland had been under a destroyer attack taking the submarine way down to 400 and some feet and limped back to Germany with only one engine running so he was the kind of submarine commander they wanted they couldn't very well reprimand him I suppose so they denied the fact that they'd sunk the ship at all No, none. After the sinking to make an attempt to sink any of the rescue boats? No, they didn't and in his subsequent attacks he tried to make some provision for the survivors but he didn't do that in the case of the Athenian which is kind of puzzling Whatever happened to him? Did he survive the war? No, well he was drowned when the U-110 was forced to the surface and they think he may have drowned trying to swim back to the submarine when he saw that HMS Bulldog was putting a boat on board but nobody knows. They did save much of the crew but not Lemp. From the war crimes the testimony of the Nuremberg war crimes trials I don't read German so I was limited in what kind of German archives I could find but the war crimes trials and Admiral Donis' memoirs and the number of journal articles gave me a pretty good picture of what how the Germans viewed all of this Yes I did and amazingly well I suppose not so amazingly there were several people in Manitoba I live in Winnipeg an elderly doctor he and his three brothers and father were young boys. It was a French family and they had gone back to France to visit the grandparents they were on the Athenian and this family all had an interesting career. One of the brothers became a successful businessman and a politician the leader of the Liberal Party in Manitoba elected to parliament in Ottawa and then appointed to the Senate and another became a diplomat and the brother that I talked to the last living brother was a surgeon in one of the Winnipeg hospitals and I had a very interesting conversation with him and there were two young boys from rural Manitoba with their mother and they had been in Scotland and both of these two brothers are still alive and I was able to interview one of them in the book launch we had in Winnipeg which was wonderful he and his wife and two daughters came to the book launch and the wife of Dr. Andre Mulgaugh Dr. Andre is getting a little frail but his wife came and the widow of one of his brothers came and all the rest of their family came to the book launch so that was very nice but I also corresponded with a number of people and in the UK so I did have some contact with survivors which was the first time I've ever had that opportunity so that was really fun the pictures I have in the book of James Goodson I got from his daughter and I had nice correspondence with his daughter and she was very gracious and letting me use some of her family photos for the book yes the submarine that sank the Athenian it survived the war and it was scuttled at the end why would it, why would they have scuttled it can't answer that, don't know in fact there are two stories to what happened but I've gone with the scuttled story one is that it was hit in the submarine in the Baltic but my source about it being scuttled seemed somewhat more reliable so that's it was taken out of active duty and used for training if I remember which was why it was in the Baltic as well how long would the survivors in the water report the first lifeboats got in the water just about a little after eight o'clock and the timing is very, of course people's watches got filled with water but so the times people gave in their testimonies tend to be a little erratic but sometime after midnight the first lifeboats were being picked up but they were still being picked up at first light in the morning when the destroyers arrived so it really went on all night people could have easily been in the water for ten hours those that were dead were they killed by the explosions on the ship well a number were killed by the explosion and I think a number of crew because it hit the engine room and the galley and so a number of crew were killed when the torpedo hit there were two accidents in launching the lifeboats the falls ran wild and the boats didn't go down even a number of people spilled out and then there was a terrible accident with the Knuth Nelson turned on its engine and it was riding empty as you could see in the picture and so one of the lifeboats was sliced by the propeller and several people were killed outright and others were drowned and then a second lifeboat was caught by the fantail you couldn't see it in my picture of the Southern Cross but it had a long fantail extending out over the stern of the vessel and by then were about ten foot waves a lifeboat got caught and flipped over and these two boys and their mother that I mentioned from Manitoba were in that boat and were thrown into the water and the crew of the Southern Cross were heroic in getting into the water themselves to rescue these people but not everyone was saved my two Manitoba boys and their mother were saved but they were brought in by different people so the mother was frantic to find her two children who were warming themselves in the engine room so the story had a happy ending but this guy Scotty Gillespie told me his mother would never talk about these experiences the two boys thought it was a great adventure but the mother would never talk about it and the people's speech to arouse the public get preserved as one of his great icons I don't think he talked about the Athenae in Parliament that first week of the war kind of giving updates as to what had happened but I don't think he gave any other of the big public speeches or I would have tracked that down I made an elaborate search as you might imagine of Churchill remarks and the Churchill cabinet papers have come out which include a lot of his speeches as well so I was delighted to find the one phrase in the War Memoirs where he talks about the Athenae shaping the convoy policy of those who died on root that was a big tattoo of it a 10-year-old girl of the name of Margaret Hayworth was hit by some shrapnel when the torpedo exploded she had her mother and her sister were on deck and the explosion came up through one of the hatches so even people on deck were injured and this young girl got a gash in her forehead and obviously much more serious damage as well and there's a poignant story there that the mother was getting herself and her daughter into the lifeboat and the other daughter was holding onto the mother's skirt and lost her grip and so the mother got into the lifeboat and then she called for her daughter and somebody handed a different child over the side of the boat into the lifeboat so the other daughter was left on the ship and she survived got home by other means but this distraught mother with an injured child on one hand and a missing child on the other and I found the account of the second child, Jacqueline, in a Toronto newspaper so I got the other part of the story which I was very grateful for but the Margaret Hayworth died on shipboard there was a doctor among the survivors and they worked very hard to try to save her and another passenger liner stopped and sent their ships doctor on board and the two doctors worked together but Margaret Hayworth died and so rather than being buried at sea she was brought back to Halifax family was from Hamilton, Ontario and an enormous funeral was held and the Premier of the province all of the local officials representative of the federal government came so it became a kind of Canadian national event and really Margaret Hayworth symbolized all of the other Canadians who were killed and the fact that the war had really come to Canada to begin with. I like to say that in fact the war came to the United States a lot of Americans died a lot of Canadians and other people as well this is really, these are the first Americans killed in World War II as well as the first Brits and the first Canadians yes the guy who had been put ashore in Iceland was when Denmark was overrun by the Germans the British occupied Denmark and so this guy was made a prisoner of war and sent off to Lethbridge, Alberta and he wrote some accounts after the war so I've seen stuff that he's he'd written after the war I don't know that anybody else was interviewed from that German crew they were all sworn to secrecy by the government as was this man who said that once Germany was defeated and he was subpoenaed wouldn't be the right word but the government figured out who were Athenian survivors British government and so they contacted him and he then gave testimony for the war crimes trial that's a very interesting story too going over the log book of the U-30 after the war in preparations for the war crimes trials they saw that the page in the submarine's log book for 3 September was not the same as all the other pages and the entries were either written in a different script or typed in a different typewriter so it was clearly not part of the continuity of the log book and that really roused suspicions that the log book had been forged as in fact it was